Artist in conversation: HJH

Born in Seoul, Korea, HJH is a self-taught contemporary photographer who creates

a complex and psychedelic universe with the concept that everything is connected in

the whole phenomenal world like a web, focused on textures, geometric shapes, and

HJH

superimposed images.

Follow HJH here.

- How did you get in the arts? Have you been formally trained?

Even though I majored in architectural design at university, I have not received any education in fine arts or similar training from a private institution. This also goes for photography as well. Because I earned a living by surveying insurance claims, I have recorded accidents and disaster scenes in photos almost everyday for 15 years. Looking back, those were much more straightforward photos than the photos classified in photojournalism.

From March 2020, I carefully begun uploading images from my personal works on Instagram. Unexpectedly, I received a great response from those in foreign countries. In particular, when I received an official request from Spain to participate in the creation of an art book, I began to have confidence in my own work style.

Moreover, in July 2020 I won the open call for selecting a Korean artist for the 2021 Sovereign Asian Art Prize hosted by the Sovereign Art Foundation based in Hong Kong and London, which gives me a chance to fully embark on this current style of photograph work.

Your work moves between more traditional photography and the digital manipulation space. How would you describe your process?

That's a good question. My works could be represented as a kind of dynamic equilibrium between traditional photography and digital manipulation. It would be necessary for critics to classify photographs into genres. However, such a classification into genres would be meaningless to artists. It is like trying to survive on a battlefield; you use a knife when the enemy is close, and go for a spear when the enemy is further off.

Technically, my works could be called the lamination of layers. Actually, the digital-looking effects originated from the layered images of traditional photography. In reality, I focus on revealing the essence of subjects by refraining from using graphic programs such as Photoshop.  

You have a very distinctive style in your experimental work. What was it that led you into the world of creating through experimentation?

Just as I mentioned earlier, the photos I took vocationally were such dry images that they did not allow any emotional intervention or subjective interpretation. As a result, however, I thought such straightforward images would be no more than a kind of “testimony” from a certain distance of the essence of accidents and objects. Sometimes, maintaining such a dry perspective could be aesthetically safe while I did not want to be remembered as a “witness.”

My work style could be a by-product generated in the middle of a hand-to-hand struggle to get close to the essence of the subjects. At least, a subject is not an object of awe, but an object of interpretation to me.

For example, whenever facing subjects that have existed by noticeably exceeding my biological life span, and would exist in the future, I was seized by a sublime feeling that could be described as looking straight at unexplainable finiteness and limitation of human beings or my biological death. From the moment a subject is perceived as a mirror reflecting the existential finiteness of myself, the manipulation of an image is a naturally beginning.

Eventually, I think that the image I select and interpret is also a part of the true essence of the subject, which inevitably reveals my present needs for a present life.

Artists face many challenges, but what do you feel is the most pressing among them?

I think that the artistic works should be a form of expression for the public which are publicly communicated and defined in social context. In reality however, it looks like sinking into a social context, or being close to “goods” of artists and celebrities that are privately distributed for the minority.

Heidegger says that human beings have been thrown into the world even though they never decided it for themselves. Artists today are becoming beings thrown into the international art market regardless of their own will.

Nevertheless, it is not easy to survive in the art market without losing my own identity, and also at the same time to present sustainable works in a social context.